Embedded Metaphor

In Embedded Metaphor, artists explore both the poetry and anxiety inherent within this emblematic object. Here the bed has proven to be protean metaphor that resonates with our era of AIDS, homelessness, abortion rights, sexual abuse, and the politics of gender. Removed from its usual domestic setting, the bed provides a forum for examining issues which have gained prominence in both the ‘real world’ and the art world in the past fifteen years. Many of the works speak to issues of mortality and vulnerability. Others comment on marriage and intimacy, or stand for battlefields where government action intrudes upon private leves. Some are presented as playpens for the unconscious, dream vehicles to encourage remembering and enable forgetting, or boats upon which childhood imagination sets sail; still others are offered as temples of devotion and suffering.